Lavina

Lavina is a dependency management and visualization tool for microservice and multi-project architectures.

The project consists of two parts:

• CLI application – scans projects, discovers internal dependencies and generates a dependency graph.
• Web UI – interactive visualization and dependency management interface built with Next.js.

The goal of Lavina is to help developers understand, maintain and propagate dependency changes across large systems containing multiple applications, libraries and shared components.

Features

Dependency Discovery

• Scans directories recursively
• Detects JavaScript and PHP projects
• Reads:
  • package.json
  • composer.json
• Maps relationships between internal projects
• Generates a dependency graph

Dependency Classification

Projects are automatically categorized as:

• Application
• Library
• Standalone

Visualization

Lavina provides a web interface for:

• Browsing dependencies
• Filtering projects
• Visualizing dependency graphs
• Exploring dependency chains
• Managing version updates

Multi-language Support

Supported project types:

• JavaScript / Node.js
• PHP / Composer

Architecture

lavina/
│
├── cli.js                    # CLI entry point
├── src/                      # CLI implementation
│
└── lavina-ui/                # Next.js UI
    ├── src/app
    ├── src/components
    └── src/lib

CLI

Built with:

• Node.js
• Commander.js
• Chalk

Responsible for:

• Project discovery
• Dependency mapping
• Dependency export

Web UI

Built with:

• Next.js 16
• React 19
• React Flow
• TanStack Table

The UI reads dependency data generated by the CLI and presents it in an interactive format.

Installation

Global Installation

npm install -g lavina

Verify installation:

lavina --version

Usage

Scan Dependencies

Run from the root directory containing your projects:

lavina scan

Verbose mode:

lavina scan --verbose

Output:

.lavina/deps.json

Open Web UI

lavina ui

This starts the bundled Next.js standalone server and opens:

http://localhost:3000

Generated Output

Lavina stores dependency information inside:

.lavina/deps.json

Example:

{
  "displayName": "rp-auth (js)",
  "version": "5.29.0",
  "category": "library",
  "projectDependencies": {
    "rp-utils (js)": "^1.5.2"
  }
}

Project Categories

Library

Used by other internal projects.

Application

Depends on internal projects but is not consumed by others.

Standalone

Has no internal dependencies and is not depended upon.

Development

Link CLI Locally

From the project root:

npm link

or

npm run dev

This makes the local version available globally as:

lavina

Run UI in Development

Navigate to:

cd lavina-ui

Install dependencies:

npm install

Start development server:

npm run dev

Build production version:

npm run build

Publishing

Build the UI:

cd lavina-ui
npm run build

Return to the project root:

cd ..

Publish package:

npm publish

Supported Dependency Sources

JavaScript

{
  "dependencies": {},
  "peerDependencies": {}
}

PHP

{
  "require": {}
}

Future Development

Planned features:

• Additional package manager support
• Additional dependency file formats
• Custom version bumping rules

Author

Elena Kikiova

Master's Degree Project

Dependency management and visualization for microservice architectures.